duotive said
We tried every time to make something new and something that has not been done before. I think with every theme we managed that, especially with the 3 latest ones.

That being said, the amount of work we put into the themes and the amount of time that i personally spend on the support forums, was worth it last year. Now i really do not know.

I consider our work to be better than a lot of themes in here, but the sales do not say that. Maybe because of the amount of new themes and low exposure, maybe because we do not copy other themes that look 100 years old with minimal design and a big ugly shadow in the middle :)) . Hell if i know.

What i think that needs to be done is to come back to the standards before and stop spamming with rubbish. I would call out names, but i am not allowed to. Even from Elites. Some seem to be adapting with the new trend. Stop caring about how the theme looks and make more and more. Why do you want this? Are the markeplaces suicidal?

Also you might want to stop buying themes that you see that authors don’t care. It’s kinda obvious who does not give a damn about the themes.

Yeah , I know which theme you’re mention . Sadly this theme style is sale very well! and TF still accept some theme that have no special points , just copy from many other themes.

That’s about it. Everything else is, in my honest opinion, a recoil of the low reviewing standard that we have now: theme-copies, themes that look worse than free themes, bad support, joking authors, and whatnot.

Add the drastic drop of quality in TF, plus the lack of requested features, and you’ve got yourself the situation we’re currently at. But, like I said, if the reviewing standard would be as it used to be (<—this is the crucial part; I’m not asking to raise the standards above normal, I’m asking for them to be BACK AT NORMAL ), then the lack of requested features wouldn’t be that bad.

I wouldn’t like to repeat what everybody else said, so I’ll just answer the initial question in the thread’s title:

Yes, it looks like Themeforest IS going downhill. I just hope it’s not too late and someone would eventually wake up!

So many things changed for the last 2,5 years – it’s scary. Unfortunately the only thing we hear lately is “No problem guys, the sales number are still growing – yet another record month”. Well… thing could/would change crazy fast I am afraid. And then it would be late…

I’ve been a buyer on Themeforest for 2.5 years. Although I’ve only purchased about 20 themes, and I know that doesn’t make me a huge contributor, I’ve noticed the quality has gone downhill. I agree that there are many duplicate themes, and many outdated styles.

I never find a theme that really fits my needs and I generally have to make drastic changes to themes to make them acceptable for real businesses, but I’m willing to do that because the quality and value here have always been so high.

Now I’m frustrated at the product and extremely frustrated with the purchasing process. Paypal has become impossible to use with my company credit card, and Moneybookers doesn’t take American Express (regardless of Envato telling is they do). I can no longer purchase themes from Envato, so I would love to find another source for quality themes, unfortunately my searches haven’t paid off in that regard.

Maybe I’ll just go back to creating themes from scratch or outsourcing design and coding and charging my clients thousands of dollars more. I don’t look forward to that; to me the speed of using a template and customizing it outweighs the higher cost I can charge for custom design from scratch.

To be fair, theme reviewers have been recently rejecting themes that look too similar with everything else here on TF. I think they’re listening and hopefully take more drastic measures to increase the quality of themes here.